Hello everyone, I’ve been using linux on my main system for the past few years and am very happy with the results. From repurposing old family laptops to give them new life, to being able to play triple A games with little to no issues, Linux has turned into my OS of choice.
Through all of the ups and downs, learning about the different distros and desktop environments/ window managers has taught me a lot about what each distro is aiming for and how they want to achieve it.
The purpose of this post is to mainly help encourage others to make the switch. Regardless of use case, I believe that it can be done better with Linux. Don’t be discouraged by the overwhelming amount of distros out there, I can say that I have spend the first year taking Linux more seriously messing with different distros and seeing what works well.
This is a list of distros that I’ve used in chronological order and my thoughts on it:
- Ubuntu - Used as email and web machine for family members on old computers, worked fine
- Linux Mint - Looks more like Windows, seems faster than Ubuntu
- Pop OS - Used for their easy install option for my Nvidia dual gpu laptop which was a pain on anything else, worked okay
- Manjaro - Was a bit more difficult to get used to, ended up feeling buggier than Linux Mint
- Endeavouros - Slightly better than Manjaro, still had random bugs and wiki was not very helpful
- Garuda OS - Similar to last two, just reskinned
- Opensuse TW - First distro that I truly enjoy, more up to date and easy to manage
- Opensuse MicroOs - Wanted to see what the immutable distro thing was about, works fine but gets hairy if you want to install non flatpaks or give flatpaks access to system files. I definitely see the use case, just not suited for what I’m doing
- Debian - Similar to first 3 without extra customization of distro, not as up to date in some areas but the tradeoff is a much more stable less bloated environment. In my opinion its the best for a system that you want to work every time with little to no issues as long as you don’t mind missing cutting edge feature
- Arch(btw) - My current distro. Spent a whole weekend trying to install it wondering if it was worth all the time. After installation, system works great on AMD hardware and is set up for dual gpu passthrough to play nearly any game with no issues. The wiki is amazing and has helped me solve any issues that I’ve come across.
To conclude, Linux is difficult at first, but after learning more about how things interact and understanding more of what’s happening, the result is extremely stable with so much to learn and discover. I also reccomend taking the dive into more terminal based applications when possible, they have been more efficient and less buggy in my experience, although I understand not wanting to live in the terminal. In the end, it’s your system and you can customize it however you need, take the time and find out what works best for you and you will be very happy with the results.
I’d say Gentoo is kinda… grittier? It’s less eager to help you out and be nice. Where Arch is like “Oh, you want Foo? Okay, here’s Foo, along with Bar and Baz to go with it” Gentoo is like “'Kay, building Foo.” Then you wonder why Foo doesn’t do Baz-y things and how it’s any good to anycritter without Bar, and it turns out those are compile-time options and you didn’t set the USE flags to include them for Foo so it wasn’t built with them. Your system never downloaded, built, or installed them at all because you didn’t tell it to. It pretty well expects you to know what you want and what you need to do it >:3 … that, and have a nice beefy CPU 😅 I tend to alternate between Arch and Gentoo every few years. Am currently using Arch (bytheway ;P) after switching from Gentoo for some comfy convenience but I kinda love both.
Funtoo is… I don’t entirely remember what it was meant to be, compared to Gentoo 😅 I vaguely recall it was supposed to have some nice features but wanted me to do sensible things like stop using ancient GRUB so I just didn’t get into it. May try that next.
As for BSDs, I’ve kinda wanted to run a BSD for a long time but none of them are what I actually want (despite my nonsensical eagerness to be and do weird wherever possible- er, I mean, despite how good and stable and cool they are!) so I just kinda poke one or two every few years, accomplish nothing, then give up. I do want to like them, though 😅
I appreciate the big response, and definitely have to look into compiling and the build process, using git, more terminal centric applications, etc. I’ve seen that there is a distro to learn Linux that comes in stages, I don’t know what it’s called off the top of my head.
Setting flags does seem very annoying, it’s hard for me to keep track of programs and settings already.